As customers are wooed in by the idea of delivery and pick-up of videos at the click of a mouse button.Not surprisingly, the service is catching up in every city in the country.
Technology is set to replace the friendly staff at your neighbourhood video library, but the process seems to have begun, thanks to the growing number of online rental services in the city.
“Weekend trips to the local video library are now a distant memory for me,” says software professional Vivek Mehra who orders DVDs of Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters from the comfort of his home. The best thing, insists Mehra, is that delivery and pickup happens at the click of a mere button.
Not surprisingly, the service is catching up in every city in the country. According to statistics available with Seventymm, an online rental service, there are nearly 25,000 users in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi.
“We are a movie crazy nation and with e-commerce picking up, the number of consumers is growing day by day,” says Subhanker Sarker, COO, Seventymm.
The company will soon set shop in other Indian cities including Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Contrary to popular belief, small town India is quite internet savvy and we aim to tap this market,” Sarker adds.
Meanwhile, Catchflix, another online movie rental company, caters to thousands of subscribers in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bhubhaneshwar.
The recently launched Rentalmasti, a book and DVD rental library, has also managed to attract several hundred customers so far. “We expect the numbers to go up to one lakh in the next year or so,” says Bobby Thomas of Rentalmasti.
Industry watchers attribute the trend to the burgeoning home entertainment market. “The business will only keep growing since we are now seeing a shift from box-office business to home entertainment, a trend that has already caught on in other parts of the world,” says entrepreneur Raghav Kher, the brain behind Seventymm.
Kher adds that he hopes to capture at least 60 per cent of the organised home video market and a million subscrbers in the next five years in India.
The services seem to be inspired by the US-based Netfilx, the world’s first and largest DVD rental service with more than six million customers globally. Since the online libraries have a license from film producers for renting out the movies, customers are assured of original copies as opposed to the pirated versions that local video rentals offer. “The online rental services are enhancing the movie watching experience,” says film buff, Sanjay Shah.
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